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TOYS, TRICKS, AND TEASERS

By Donald Simanek, Recreational Physicist

THINGS YOU CAN’T MAKE

Simple tricks of illusion make the impossible a reality.

MAKE readers enjoy making things that are useful in innovative or just plain weird ways. Some of these great ideas work well and reach the pages of this magazine. Some just don’t work out in the real world. And some ideas are downright misguided.

For a change of pace, having recently neglected “teasers” in these pages, I put some thought into things you simply can’t make, no matter how clever and ingenious you are. There are still folks who think, “Anything is possible if you tinker with it enough.” ...

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